Best Summer Cover Crops

For weed suppression and a major boost to soil fertility, sow these four fast-growing summer cover crops in any patch possible, even during your prime gardening season.

Sunn hemp, a nitrogen-fixing legume from the tropics, can soar to an impressive 9 feet high in a matter of weeks.

Photo by Harvey Ussery

Sow a patch of cowpeas to set nitrogen between spring and fall plantings.

Photo by Harvey Ussery

Nitrogen-fixing cowpeas can be grown between spring and fall plantings and then cut to form an excellent mulch.

Photo by Harvey Ussery

Fast-growing buckwheat forms a dense cover that shades out weeds, and the crop’s blooms bring in bees and other beneficial insects.

Photo by Barbara Pleasant

Growing buckwheat as a cover crop in your garden provides blooms that bring in bees and other beneficial insects.

Photo by Fotolia/Leonid Ikan

On this farm, allelopathic sorghum-sudangrass is grown in alleyways to suppress weeds and produce fodder for compost, while cowpeas fix nitrogen in the space to be followed by food crops.

Photo by Mark Schonbeck

In small plots, you can cut cover crops with a hand sickle.

Photo by Cheryl Long

Sunn hemp undergoes an impressive growth spurt from two weeks (shown here) to four weeks. In dense plantings, it can set more than 120 pounds of nitrogen and 5,000 pounds of biomass per acre—or twice that if you cut the crop back, stimulating branching and additional root penetration.

Photo by Harvey Ussery

Sunn hemp undergoes an impressive growth spurt from two weeks to four weeks (shown here). Plant sunn hemp a week or two after you’d plant sweet corn in your area, and succession sow up to nine weeks before a killing frost.

Photo by Harvey Ussery

Sunn hemp’s yellow blooms boost insect diversity. Sunn hemp can be a valuable fodder for livestock, but only if the variety grown is ‘Tropic Sun.’ Other strains contain toxic alkaloids.

Photo by Glenn Sakamoto Photography

Use a scythe to efficiently cut back cover crops in large plots. Make multiple cuttings to encourage regrowth.

Subscribe Today - Pay Now & Save 66% Off the Cover Price

Lighten the Strain on the Earth and Your Budget

At MOTHER EARTH NEWS, we are dedicated to conserving our planet's natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources. That's why we want you to save money and trees by subscribing through our earth-friendly automatic renewal savings plan. By paying with a credit card, you save an additional $5 and get 6 issues of MOTHER EARTH NEWS for only $12.00 (USA only).